Simon's answer to the question, "Do I believe in demons?" challenges us all to a renewal of epistemology

 In his book, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, Ed Simon, posits a “demonic poetics” as a potential language to ‘address’ the question of whether or not ‘he’ believes in demons.

There are, for Simon, 7 principles of Demonic Poetics, articulated in his essay on Lithub.com, February 23, 2022. They are quoted here:

1.     Whether demons exist or not, people’s experience of them absolutely exists.

2.     The de3monic is a network of metaphors, symbols, and images that define the diabolical; they shift and interact with each other in different ways across the centuries.

3.     3. As symbols, demons can mean variable and often contradictory things.

4.     There is no clear distinction between categories of the aesthetic and the occult, and demonic poetics is an interpretive frame that understands the literary and the magical as fundamentally the same thing

5. Some demons are always more symbolically ascendant in a given epoch.

6.     Demons exist at the crux of the transcendent, the numinous, the sublime; they are by definition evil, but they are also by definition an aspect of the sacred. There is a something at the core of being that encompasses both the divine and the diabolical, but our language to describe it is always contingent.

7.     A history of demonology is by necessity a history of the world.

From the beginning of human history, humans have spoken about, written about, and drawn on the walls of caves about creatures that exaggerated traits of goodness and beauty, as well as demonic and sinister forces. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793, William Blake writes:

Rintrah* roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air/ Hungry clouds swag on the deep”

(*Rintrah is a character in William Blake’s mythology representing the just wrath of the prophet, first appearing in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

Karen Armstrong, in her book, The Case for God, writes:

In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking and speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos.  Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each has its own sphere of competence, and it was considered unwise to mxi the two. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore to correspond accurately to external reality. People have always needed logos to make an efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logo was forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment, improving old insights, or inventing something fresh. Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it has its limitations; it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or ‘myth’….In popular parlance, a ‘myth’ is something that is not true. But in the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy; rather, like logos, it helped people to live effectively in our confusing world, though in a different way. Myths have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos. Myth has been called a primitive form of psychology. When a myth described heroes threading their way through labyrinths, descending into the underworld, of fighting monste4rs, these were not understood as primarily factual stories. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly8n influence our thought and behaviour. People had to enter the warren of their own minds and fight their own personal demons. When Freud and Jung began to chart their scientific search for the soul, they instinctively turned to these ancient myths. A myth was neve inte4nded as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that has in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time…..But a myth would not be effective if people simply ‘believed’ in it. It was essentially a program of action. It could put you in the correct spiritual or psychological posture, but it was up to you to take the next step and make the ‘truth’ of the myth a reality in your own life. The only way to assess the value and truth of any myth was to act upon it…..(Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, Knopf, New York, Toronto, p. xi)

“The Eden Story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race. In Eden, Adam and Eve are still in the womb; they have to grow up, and the snake is there to guide them through the perplexing rite of passage to maturity. To know the pain and to be conscious of desire and mortality are inescapable components of human experience, but they are also symptoms of that sense of estrangement from the fullness of being that inspires the nostalgia for paradise lost. We can see Adam, Eve and the serpent as representing different facets of our humanity. In the snake is the rebelliousness and incessant compulsion to question everything that is crucial to human progress; in Eve we see our hunger for knowledge, our desire to experiment, and our longing for a life free of inhibition. Adam, a rather passive figure, displays our reluctance to take responsibility for our actions. The story shows that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in human life. Our prodigious knowledge can at one and the same time be a source of benefit and the cause of immense harm. The rabbis of the Talmudic age understood this perfectly. They did not see the ‘fall’ of Adam as a catastrophe, because the ‘evil inclination’ (yeytzer ha’ra) was an essential p[art of human life, and the aggression, competitive edge, and ambition that it generates are bound up with some of our greatest achievements….The Eden story is not an historical account; it is rather a description of a ritual experience. It expresses what scholars have called the coincidentia oppositorum in which, during a heightened encounter with the sacred, things that normally seem opposed coincide to reveal an underlying unity. In Eden, the divine and the human are not estranged but are in the same ‘place’: we see Yahweh ‘walking about in the garden at the breezy-time of the day’; there is no opposition between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural,’ since Adam is animated by the breath of God himself. (Armstrong, op. cit. p.28-9)

Whether natural and supernatural, or good and evil were ever separated, is neither a mute question nor really warranting much debate. For our purposes, each half of the duality is an intimate and integral part of the other half.  Humans, it would seem, live on the razor’s edge that connects/separates them. And while the language of practical sense, (Frye’s Educated Imagination) uses words descriptively to “separate, and to divide’ and to analyse and to parse” the language of the imagination is essentially a language of bringing disparate things into unity. The deployment of metaphor, similar, personification literary devices, while not discussed as part of the vernacular of the public square, are the bridges that mirror and also ‘lamp’ both our ‘interior world and our exterior world, as well as their mutual inter-dependence. It is often repeated, by politicians, ‘we campaign in poetry and govern in prose’…And even that epithet is a reductionism, confining the process of selling themselves and their policies into a transaction to solicit votes, first by carefully crafted and even potentially seductive images, whereas the process of governing grapples with the ‘nuts and bolts’ of unemployment numbers, inflation numbers, pandemic cases, deaths and hospitalizations, deficit and debt numbers and Consumer price indices (CPI), GNP (Gross National Product)…etcIn Ancient Chinese philosophy, yin and yang (dark-light, negative-positive) is a concept that described how obviously opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another (Wikipedia)

In the west, currently primarily occupying a “logos” culture, deploying the alphabet STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as a social, cultural and pseudo-religious mantra, we are at risk of abandoning some of the inherent qualities of the numinous, the incomprehensible, the ineffable and the effable, And we risk not only abandoning those qualities, but of actually collapsing our “world view” into various files, programs, algorithms and formulae for which we may apply demonic names, evil spirit names, gods or dragons of infamy or the underworld.

Simon’s diligence and sensitivity in depicting, describing and denoting a demonic poetics, while extending many of the qualities of the ancient mythologies, is a contemporary and honourable and insightful and imaginative rendering of a detailed explication of his answer to the question of whether or not he believes in demons. Belief, in a time of drowning in correspondence theory epistemology, has become almost erased from our linguistic encyclopaedia. Just as truth has suffered decapitations from purveyors of political propaganda (trump, putin et al), so too has belief suffered from the slings and arrows of the anemic world view of literalists, and their dark-side counterparts, the denialists.

Poetics, whether of the demonic or of the sacred, has suffered too, from these waves of cultural deprivation. We are, together, complicit in a chemical scorched-earth campaign to leave little more than burned-out metallic corpses of a once-honoured and highly venerated linguistic tradition. I witnessed the decay of both the use of and the embrace of poetics inside the ecclesial structures of the last decades of the twentieth century on both sides of the 49^th parallel. Obsessions of money and sexuality, and their barnacles of dark-blood-sucking distortions, marched headstrong over those more balletic, empathic, and sylph-like attributes of the ethics and morality of forgiveness and transformation. Empty pews, coffers and the litany of empty-and-sold-off sanctuaries testify to the emptiness and the hollowness of multiple faith communities’ having fallen into the tidal wave and the whirlpools of secular, minimalist, and anemic language dark caves.

God, too has become another character in a transactional, empirical chess-board, to whom the question, ‘what have you done for me lately?’ is asked indiscriminately and vacuously. Of course, clouds of prayers are rising through the atmosphere on both side of the Atlantic, now that another Lucifer has unleashed the ‘dogs of war’ on another innocent, self-possessed and highly courageous and obviously deeply spiritual tribe, the Ukrainians. It is and can only be a vapid hope and empty dream of the Russian wannabe-czar that he would so seduce and rape and pillage and kill,  and then hope to embrace this tribe of men and women and children.

As Armstrong reminds us, myths, including their archetypal characters, do repeat throughout human history. And their relative proximity to, relationship to and incarnation of the best instincts and aspirations and subtleties or the worst, most contemptuous, sinister, hellish and demonic potential of the full range of human capacities, in extremis, will inevitably and invariably, capture our attention. Whether that attention emerges from an intellectual, a pedagogical, scientific or a spiritual world view, depends on our unique perspective. And whether that attention seeks to embrace or to avoid, or to welcome the incomprehensibility, as another of the humbling and real contextual currents in which we all swim, also depends on our comfort level with the space in the yaw of the waves between yin and yang, between heaven and hell, and between empirical truth and a method and process of enhancing our imagination to embrace our wholeness.

It is our capacity to be willing and able to embrace that which we do not know, and those things/imps/demons/spirits/angels/gods/ that will always escape our grasp,   and our cognition, that will continually remind us that the human spirit will never die….

Faulkner’s historic speech on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question, When will I be blown up/ Because of this, the young man or women writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat….It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the las red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound; that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking….I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Simon’s history of demonology is another honourable work, dedicated to bridging the gap between questions like “do I believe in demons?” and the full truth and reality of any response worthy of Simon, or any other writer who take the question seriously, sensitively and substantively. The human mind and spirit, like the question of demons and gods and myths and our relationship to them, whether through the lens of cognition, intuition, experience and/or emotion, will offer new glimpses of the rich complexities of both ourselves and our world.

Thanks to Simon for his profound insight and his provocative nudge into a wider, fuller, deeper and richer explication and understanding of the most mundane of questions. Would that such a mind and spirit were extant and scurrying around and through the corridors of the Capitol, the universities, and the churches and the corporate offices, including the Pentagon and the Kremlin.

Twiggy-like epistemology can only produce emaciated offspring and in the process starve us all on its own vapid fast-food.